Just Friends? Just Kidding.

As evident in almost any romantic comedy ever made, it has been said that boys and girls can never be "just friends." There's a variety of cliches following the formula "the only person a girl can trust is her dad/girlfriends/dog," but it is unanimously agreed that a girl cannot trust any non-related, heterosexual boy. Nearly consistently throughout my entire (un)romantic life I've found this to be the case. Whenever I'm happily involved with a guy, the relationship is nothing more than a rapidly ticking time bomb that is in danger of exploding at any given moment, resulting in the annihilation of my chances at a happy ending. Depressing, I know. On a positive note, at home in New Jersey I'm blessed with the best guy friends a girl could ever ask for (I attribute this to the fact that these boys knew me during my awkward phase), so while I never had a high school sweetheart, that male void was filled platonically. However, at college I have only one guy friend. The rest of the guys I consider "friends" are guys that I hooked up with and are on good terms with after the fact. And, you guessed it, the remaining male population at this school are guys that I hooked up with and am on not-so-good terms with.
For my sorority, I was presented with the stressful task of inviting someone to my date party. I didn't have anyone that I was interested in at the moment, so I decided to invite the only guy friend I had that I had never hooked up with and furthermore never wanted to. This situation ended up being absolutely ideal because the night before the date party I ended up being letdown by a guy I'd really liked and had hooked up with on numerous occasions. I woke up unfortunately alone, and in a hungover/depressed state that I'd been so disappointed by someone I'd liked so much. I'd lost my faith in men (yet again), so I was genuinely relieved to be going to my date party with my guy friend.
"Last night was terrible, we need to have the funnest time ever tonight!!" I texted him.
"Love, you're going to have the best night of your life," he answered. In all honestly, I kind of suspected he'd never tried to get with me because he was gay.
Feeling a little better, I slept off the rest of my hangover and woke up much later that afternoon with enough time to grab some dinner and get ready for the party. Then, I went over to my date's place to pregame for the event. Being around a friend had taken my mind off of my shitty experience with guys the night before and I was back to being in a good mood. The pregame was fun, but once we got on the bus to the venue it hit me hard that not everybody was there as friends. In fact, being entrapped by the rows of drunk people making out it seemed that nobody was just friends. Things were better when we got to the venue. There were more people using their mouths to talk rather than make out, the DJ was decent, and my date had scored a drink bracelet and kept buying me drinks like a good date should. Somewhere between all the vodka tonics, three hours had passed and it was time to get on the bus home.  I was tired from the hours of drinking and dancing, but it seemed my date was even more tired by the way he started leaning onto me. In that moment, my drunken haze cleared and I realized he's not trying to sleep on me, he's trying to hook up with me. I tensed up and cheated my back towards him which seemed to do the trick. He straightened up and we snapped back into our normal banter. The bus arrived back at campus, but since it was only 12 the night was still pretty young. I was going to walk back to my dorm, but my date looked disappointed with that.
"Come back to the house and hang, it's so early!" He said. I was drunk enough to disregard what he'd seemingly tried to pull on the bus, but clearminded enough to trust him since he was my friend.
But once we got to his room it was blatant that he didn't consider me a friend the same way I considered him one. He immediately started kissing me, to which I hesitated.
"Come on, stop."
"What, why?" His mouth wasn't on mine anymore, but he was still heavily in my personal space.
"Because we're friends!"
"But Love, we will still be friends even if we hook up a little!" This time when he called me Love, I didn't think he might be gay.
"Are you sure?"
"Yes, of course!" I'm not sure why I listened to him, I guess my subconscious still trusted him as "a friend," so I didn't leave the room and even though I was uncomfortable with it I let him kiss me.
I wanted so badly to leave, but I just kept on letting the hook up happen. Every so often I'd snap out of it and ask "Okay, will you walk me home?" to which he'd reply, "Of course, Love! Just in a couple minutes." A couple minutes came and went, until I didn't even know how much time had gone by. I stop letting my subconscious trust reign, and my conscious realized we were both completely naked. It was time to get out of here before anything else happened. Fueled by anxiety, I sat up and pulled on my clothes. When I turned back around to tell "my friend" that it was time to walk me home, he was lying there passed out. I tried to shake him awake.
"Come on, wake up." But he wouldn't move. "Seriously, come on, you need to walk me home." Still nothing.
I wanted to call a cab but I had no money. In that moment I had to turn to the only people I could depend on, and that was my girl friends. I pulled out my phone to call my friend with a car, when I saw it was 3:30 in the morning. Please wake up, please wake up, I prayed as the phone rang.
"Hello?" Her sleepy voice said on the line.
"I am so sorry to wake you up, I just really need your help." I tried to keep my voice as low as I could so not to wake my "friend."
"What's wrong?" Her voice became more alert.
"My date party turned out really badly... Do you think there's any way you could come pick me up?"
"Yeah, of course. Are you okay?"
"Eh, not really..."
"I'm coming now. You're at his place?"
"Yeah, I am. Oh my God, thank you so much," I couldn't believe it. I was so thankful to have such a good friend. With heels in hand, I snuck out of his room as quietly as I could. Sure enough, a couple minutes later my friends car pulled up outside. I didn't know whether to cry of happiness or cry because I was so mad about what had just happened.
Not only was my romantic faith in guys destroyed, now my platonic faith in guys was destroyed too. I'd trusted this guy as a friend and he destroyed everything. He had failed to walk me home as a friend, but coming to my rescue was my girl friend who drove me to sleep over at her apartment. While my guy friend had passed out after promising to walk me home, my girl friend had woken up at 3:30 in the morning and picked me up. Once we got to her apartment, she sat up with me and listened to me talk about what had happened. She told me that while this guy was an asshole, she's always be here for me and then she tucked me into bed. That was the night that I learned I could only and always depend on my girlfriends.

Mean Girls

It's pretty much become a ritual of mine to cuddle on my couch stealing kisses from my dog after a night of being out. Night after night I come home in the mindset that all guys are inherently evil due to things that happened (or didn't happen), objectifying texts I received (or didn't receive), or Facebook relationship statuses making people "off limits" (these are above all the worst to not be a part of); after the days' disappointing events, I can't help but lie there while my sleeps on my chest and arrive at the conclusion that he's the only guy in my life who will always be happy to see me when I come home, lick my face and no one elses, and always stay for breakfast after sleeping in my bed. Dogs, unlike guys, are inherently good.
After doing this for numerous nights, I grew more and more desensitized to the fact that the only "good" guy I'd ever love was one that I kept on a leash when we left the house. At least, I thought I was getting over it until I had a very candid conversation with a guy friend of mine. We were sitting in my backyard talking about past, present, and what we hoped would be future romances. I was sprawled out on the grass absorbing the sunlight while my friend hid under the shade of a tree, but the spotlight was on him as the conversation turned to his ex-girlfriend.
"You can't even call that a relationship, though" he said while he tugged at a blade of grass, "I was so mean to her. I didn't even like her, really."
"You're mean to all girls," even though he's my friend, it's still true. In fact, by being his friend he tells me a lot of things about girls that give me evidence to support my claim.
"I mean, yeah, but like, I used to be nice to girls. I just got sick of getting played out."
"When were you ever nice to girls?"
"Like, freshman year. But every girl I liked would friend zone me and only hook up with older guys who could drive and shit. So I stopped trying to get girls by being nice."
His honesty hit me hard, "Are you serious?"
"Yeah. Happens to every guy."
The myth that I'd dedicated my entire life to ciphering had just been debunked: guys are inherently good, but in every boy's life there are girls who sees them and their niceness exclusively as "friend" qualities and thus deny the boys sexual existence. It is because these girls are mean to them that they stop being nice boys and turn into asshole guys. Like proverbial balls dropping, this is something every boy has to go through before he becomes a guy.
I couldn't believe it. I'd spent my nineteen years of living wondering why guys were such assholes only to realize it was my fault. While I wasn't the one to play out this specific guy, I was one of those girls who swooned over older guys because they had cars and fake IDs. And even more reprehensibly, I was one of those girls who completely rejected the boys my age because they didn't have the bad boy allure of being an older guy. In my youthful stupidity, I'd separated "nice" from "hot," while all I wanted in the present was for those two qualities to mix. Instead of doing the illegal thing of finding one of these young boys who hadn't been turned mean yet, I took a vow to teach my future daughter that, no matter how hot she may grow to be, she must be nice to all boys. If she wants to be a bitch to other girls then that's fine.